Canadian Medical Association Redefines Human Life

The Canadian Medical Association, the largest association of doctors in Canada, has redefined human life. On August 15, as reported by LifeNews[2], delegates to the CMA’s general council voted to pass “a resolution supporting the current wording of the Criminal Code which states that a child ‘becomes a human being within the meaning of this Act when it has completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother.’ ”

The CMA resolution is intended to support the nation’s criminal code, which defines an infant as a human being only after the infant is born.

Canadian Physicians for Life decried the action, calling it shameful and unethical. Dr. Will Johnston, president of that organization, said that “every Canadian doctor knows that the unborn child is a live human being…. CMA delegates worry about children not exercising enough or not wearing bicycle helmets, while over one hundred thousand children go missing from our playgrounds every year because they were killed by abortion.”

Dr. John Shea of Canadian Physicians for Life said that the CMA should be “ashamed of themselves for failing to recognize when human life begins. The biological fact is what counts here, which is when the ovum and the sperm unite, a single-celled human organism is formed. Period. This organism is a human being, a person at the single-cell stage. From that point in time he or she has rights. Anybody who denies that fact is denying biological reality; they are lying.”

That “biological reality” is denied in Canada by national statutes that prevent abortion from being considered the taking of human life. That it something that Conservative Member of Parliament Steve Woodworth sought to challenge in the House of Commons last February, when he asked for a special committee to consider when human life begins. Woodworth’s motion does not have the support of his party’s leader, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has pledged to vote against the motion when it comes up to a vote in the House of Commons.

For centuries, physicians have professed the Hippocratic Oath before being recognized in the medical community as physicians. The oath, a relatively brief statement of eight general pledges, includes as one of those pledges the following language:

I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest such counsel, and in like manner, I will not give a woman a pessary to produce abortion.

The Hippocratic Oath, however, has been altered. Now medical schools in America, reflecting the changed attitude towards abortion, have dropped completely the sentence quoted above.

In the United States, the American Medical Association has also moved away from a strongly pro-life position into an attitude of almost complete moral indifference toward abortion. In 1859, the AMA decried abortion as “the slaughter of countless children, such unwarranted destruction of human life.” Twelve years later, in 1871, the AMA referred to abortion as “the work of destruction, the wholesale destruction of unborn infants.” Yet by 1967, the euphemistic language began to refer to unborn children as something less than human life, and the AMA called abortion “the interruption of pregnancy; the induced termination of pregnancy.” By 1970, the dehumanization of unborn children was essentially complete when abortion was simply called “a medical procedure.”

The British Medical Association, a close international colleague of the American Medical Association and the Canadian Medical Association, in late June of this year showed that pro-life advocates can claim some victories, even in places such as Britain that have long had legalized abortion. The BMA passed a resolution saying that any woman seeking an abortion ought to receive counseling and that this counseling should not be given by an abortion clinic or the people performing the abortion.

Those familiar with the history of the 20th century know that the Nazis were passionate supporters of ending unwelcome or unwarranted and helpless human life. In fact, it was the Nazis who coined the term “Life Unworthy of Life.” On June 8, 1943, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the SS monster later executed at Nuremburg, ordered: “In the case of eastern female workers, pregnancy may be interrupted if desired. If a racially valuable result is to be expected, the abortion is to be denied … if not valuable, the abortion is to be granted.” In fact, “encouraging and compelling abortion” was considered one of the crimes against humanity in the war crimes trials of Nazis.

If an association of medical professionals was giving the option of following in the footsteps of Hippocrates or following in the footsteps of Himmler, the decision would seem to be pretty easy.